Business Eye: Worshipping at altar of $1m-an-hour business guru

Alex Pratt

Alex Pratt, chairman of Bucks Business First

Published:07:00Sunday 27 July 2014

Share this article

I spent last week worshipping at the altar of Anthony Robbins who delivered his Business Mastery event to an adoring high energy crowd of 600 entrepreneurs, each paying £5,000 for the privilege of five days with the man himself plus a few global experts in financial optics, real-time marketing and leadership.

You might think a £3m gig is a big pay day for this guy but this is someone who charges a US$1m an hour for one on one coaching sessions and who counts amongst his friends and clients winners like Serena Williams, Oprah, Richard Branson, and Bill Clinton.

On this basis, £5k looked like a bargain to me …and boy was I right. If you ever get the chance to see this this guy; just do it.

You will not regret it.

So what did we learn or were we reminded of?

There is too much to cover here but benefits ranged between new skills, experiences, approaches, systems and a completely new psychology.

Specifically, we were reminded that a business is in the end purely about adding ever more value to customers, that this doesn’t happen by mistake and that the foundation is your people and culture, towards which we tend to take too much of an amateurish approach.

How many of us find out WDTRW (What do they really want), then GAGT (Go and get it) and GITT (Give it to them)?

Far too many fall in love with a product and not the ideal customer….a fundamental mistake.

Very few business leaders truly master the art and science of business; most of us are dabblers.

We learned that your state of mind significantly impacts how you feel; in other words your psychology and physiology are hard-wired together.

Feel low and your body shows it, but get up, move and breathe and you will alter the way you think and perform.

In the connected world, interesting stuff happens in the moment so learning to “Newsjack” and be heard above the noise was an eye-opener.

My favourite was. ‘We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet’– even the CIA, the most secretive firm on the planet is on twitter and using humour to break-through the noise.

The breakthrough for me personally was that as the leader you are a modern day gladiator and gladiator’s die by dabbling and that in the end every failure of leadership has at its roots a lack of courage.